Consumption of highly processed snacks,sugar‐sweetened beverages and child feeding practices in a rural area of Nicaragua

Appropriate feeding behaviours are important for child growth and development. In societies undergoing nutrition transition, new food items are introduced that may be unfavourable for child health. Set in rural Nicaragua, the aim of this study was to describe the infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices as well as the consumption of highly processed snack foods (HP snacks) and sugar‐sweetened beverages (SSBs). All households with at least one child 0‐ to 35‐month‐old (n = 1371) were visited to collect information on current IYCF practices in the youngest child as well as consumption of SSBs and HP snacks. Breastfeeding was dominant (98%) among 0‐ to 1‐month‐olds and continued to be prevalent (60%) in the second year, while only 34% of the 0‐ to 5‐month‐olds were exclusively breastfed. Complementary feeding practices were deemed acceptable for only 59% of the 6‐ to 11‐month‐old infants, with low dietary diversity reported for 50% and inadequate meal frequency reported for 30%. Consumption of HP snacks and SSBs was frequent and started early; among 6‐ to 8‐month‐olds, 42% and 32% had consumed HP snacks and SSBs, respectively. The difference between the observed IYCF behaviours and World Health Organization recommendations raises concern of increased risk of infections and insufficient intake of micronutrients that may impair linear growth. The concurrent high consumption of SSBs and HP snacks may increase the risk of displacing the recommended feeding behaviours. To promote immediate and long‐term health, growth and development, there is a need to both promote recommended IYCF practices as well as discourage unfavourable feeding behaviours.     

Improving cluster visualization in self-organizing maps: application in gene expression data analysis

Cluster analysis is one of the crucial steps in gene expression pattern (GEP) analysis. It leads to the discovery or identification of temporal patterns and coexpressed genes. GEP analysis involves highly dimensional multivariate data which demand appropriate tools. A good alternative for grouping many multidimensional objects is self-organizing maps (SOM), an unsupervised neural network algorithm able to find relationships among data. SOM groups and maps them topologically. However, it may be difficult to identify clusters with the usual visualization tools for SOM. We propose a simple algorithm to identify and visualize clusters in SOM (the RP-Q method). The RP is a new node-adaptive attribute that moves in a two dimensional virtual space imitating the movement of the codebooks vectors of the SOM net into the input space. The Q statistic evaluates the SOM structure providing an estimation of the number of clusters underlying the data set. The SOM-RP-Q algorithm permits the visualization of clusters in the SOM and their node patterns. The algorithm was evaluated in several simulated and real GEP data sets. Results show that the proposed algorithm successfully displays the underlying cluster structure directly from the SOM and is robust to different net sizes.     

Antepartum Screening for Group B Streptococcus by Three FDA-Cleared Molecular Tests and Effect of Shortened Enrichment Culture on Molecular Detection Rates

Neonatal Streptococcus agalactiae infections cause significant morbidity and mortality, and antenatal screening is recommended. We compared three U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-cleared nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs) to culture using 314 vaginal/rectal swabs after 18 to 24 h (recommended period) and 4 to 8 h (shortened period) of broth enrichment. Agreement of the NAATs with each other was high (97.1% to 98.4%), but culture was less sensitive than all NAATs (67% to 73%). A shortened period of broth culture enrichment resulted in 1 false-negative result in 68 (1.5%). The NAATs performed comparably and were more sensitive than culture.     

Benign hepatic cyst in a patient on antiestrogen therapy for metastatic breast cancer

Tamoxifen is a useful agent in the management of metastatic breast cancer. We describe a patient who was treated sucessfully with Tamoxifen but developed a benign but symptomatic hepatic cyst during treatment. Development of a solitary hepatic lesion during Tamoxifen therapy should be thoroughly investigated before treatment is changed. Cancer 50:1882-1883, 1982.     

Victimization among homeless women: Implications for service delivery

This article focuses on the experience of victimization among a representative sample of 141 homeless women interviewed in a single-adult shelter in New York City. The frequency of victimization experiences, specifically aggressive sexual and physical assault, was high. Twenty-one women reported being raped, 42 women reported both rape and physical abuse, and 62 women reported physical abuse without sexual abuse. Shelter women reporting frequent experiences were likely to experience high levels of depressive symptoms; psychotic symptoms; and hospitalization for psychiatric, medical, alcohol, and drug problems. These results further indicate that assault experiences cluster in specific ways and are associated with different clinical outcomes. These findings are seen as underscoring the need for service delivery programs to respond to the experience of vicitimization among homeless women and suggest some future research directions.     

TarSeqQC: Quality control on targeted sequencing experiments in R

Targeted sequencing (TS) is growing as a screening methodology used in research and medical genetics to identify genomic alterations causing human diseases. In general, a list of possible genomic variants is derived from mapped reads through a variant calling step. This processing step is usually based on variant coverage, although it may be affected by several factors. Therefore, undercovered relevant clinical variants may not be reported, affecting pathology diagnosis or treatment. Thus, a prior quality control of the experiment is critical to determine variant detection accuracy and to avoid erroneous medical conclusions. There are several quality control tools, but they are focused on issues related to whole‐genome sequencing. However, in TS, quality control should assess experiment, gene, and genomic region performances based on achieved coverages. Here, we propose TarSeqQC R package for quality control in TS experiments. The tool is freely available at Bioconductor repository. TarSeqQC was used to analyze two datasets; low‐performance primer pools and features were detected, enhancing the quality of experiment results. Read count profiles were also explored, showing TarSeqQC's effectiveness as an exploration tool. Our proposal may be a valuable bioinformatic tool for routinely TS experiments in both research and medical genetics.     

Force sensor in simulated skin and neural model mimic tactile sai afferent spiking response to ramp and hold stimuli

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: The next generation of prosthetic limbs will restore sensory feedback to the nervous system by mimicking how skin mechanoreceptors, innervated by afferents, produce trains of action potentials in response to compressive stimuli. Prior work has addressed building sensors within skin substitutes for robotics, modeling skin mechanics and neural dynamics of mechanotransduction, and predicting response timing of action potentials for vibration. The effort here is unique because it accounts for skin elasticity by measuring force within simulated skin, utilizes few free model parameters for parsimony, and separates parameter fitting and model validation. Additionally, the ramp-and-hold, sustained stimuli used in this work capture the essential features of the everyday task of contacting and holding an object. METHODS: This systems integration effort computationally replicates the neural firing behavior for a slowly adapting type I (SAI) afferent in its temporally varying response to both intensity and rate of indentation force by combining a physical force sensor, housed in a skin-like substrate, with a mathematical model of neuronal spiking, the leaky integrate-and-fire. Comparison experiments were then conducted using ramp-and-hold stimuli on both the spiking-sensor model and mouse SAI afferents. The model parameters were iteratively fit against recorded SAI interspike intervals (ISI) before validating the model to assess its performance. RESULTS: Model-predicted spike firing compares favorably with that observed for single SAI afferents. As indentation magnitude increases (1.2, 1.3, to 1.4 mm), mean ISI decreases from 98.81 +/- 24.73, 54.52 +/- 6.94, to 41.11 +/- 6.11 ms. Moreover, as rate of ramp-up increases, ISI during ramp-up decreases from 21.85 +/- 5.33, 19.98 +/- 3.10, to 15.42 +/- 2.41 ms. Considering first spikes, the predicted latencies exhibited a decreasing trend as stimulus rate increased, as is observed in afferent recordings. Finally, the SAI afferent's characteristic response of producing irregular ISIs is shown to be controllable via manipulating the output filtering from the sensor or adding stochastic noise. CONCLUSIONS: This integrated engineering approach extends prior works focused upon neural dynamics and vibration. Future efforts will perfect measures of performance, such as first spike latency and irregular ISIs, and link the generation of characteristic features within trains of action potentials with current pulse waveforms that stimulate single action potentials at the peripheral afferent.